Some of you may know that we’re running out of IPv4 addresses! Not just brsk but the entire world!

So much so that it would be extremely difficult, impossible even, to give everybody in the world who has an internet service a public IP as there just aren’t enough to go around.

As such, many providers are using CGNAT to conserve as many IPv4 addresses as possible.

CGNAT or Carrier Grade Network Address Translation allows us to let multiple customers use the same external IP address.

CGNAT works very similarly to the way your home router works.

Your home router will allow you to have multiple devices connect to it and use the same external IPv4 address, this is done using NAT (Network Address Translation) and PAT (Port Address Translation).

It does this by having a database of internal IP addresses and ports to map out what data is coming and going from the internet to the devices in your home.

For example, your laptop may have an internal IP of 192.168.1.123 but your router has an external IP of 45.82.141.36

Your router will map the data going from your laptop out to the internet so it knows where the data comes from and what device the data needs to go back to, this is called NAT.

Diving a little deeper, PAT translates the ports your applications use to external ports.

So, let's say Google Chrome wants to use port 443 to get to a website, your router will translate this to a different random port which allows multiple devices on your network to use port 443.

CGNAT works the exact same way, but our CGNAT servers translate from the customer's router to the outside world!

Nope! Our CGNAT servers are, to put it bluntly, absolute UNITS! We don’t expect customers to see any performance issues if they’re behind CGNAT.

Port forwarding statically maps an internal port on a device (like a CCTV system) to the external port of a router, for example, 8443 to 8443. As this static mapping doesn’t follow through to our CGNAT servers, the port forwarding rules will appear as though they don’t work.